Interview with Robert Gildea

Jennie Rothenberg interviews Robert Gildea, in the Atlantic
(Nov. 2003):

In the immense canon of books about Europe during World War II, numerous
works center on France, immortalizing the glory of la Résistance or
revealing dark scandals of Nazi collaboration. Marianne in Chains is a different
kind of story. In its pages, author Robert Gildea tells the tales of ordinary
French people who were less concerned with abetting or resisting the Nazis
than with maintaining their everyday lives.

Rather than surveying the entire nation, Gildea chose to focus on the Loire
Valley, a coastal region that was part of France's occupied northern zone.
Exploring newly opened archives and interviewing numerous older citizens,
he was able to reassemble a picture of daily life during the occupation, complete
with farmers, café owners, priests, and accordion players. More sensational
characters do make occasional appearances: underground activists, corrupt
officials, and informants reminiscent of Dickens's sinister Madame Defarge.
But Gildea's research centers first and foremost on mainstream citizens, and
his stated purpose is to move "beyond praise and blame... to understand
actions and sentiments in terms of the options and values obtained under the
occupation, the one extremely limited and the other extremely fluid."

Compared with other parts of Europemost notably the Eastern Front and
the Balkansthe Nazi occupation of France was relatively gentle. The
French, whose Latin heritage ranked them high in Hitler's racial hierarchy,
were given more freedom than those of other nations to maintain their local
governments, churches, and ways of life. Food was scarce, but rather than
focusing on hunger and poverty, Gildea looks at the resourcefulness of the
French people as they satisfied their daily needs through clandestine networks
and "gray markets." In one chapter entitled "Circuses,"
he spends two full pages listing youth clubs and leisure organizations that
existed in occupied France, demonstrating that the French people did not spend
the war years "cowering at home."

Gildea's demystifying approach to history has not always made him popular
with French academics. His book begins with an account of a 1997 paper he
presented at the Academy of Tours, in which he argued that not all French
people spent the war years in misery and starvation, and the riot his conclusions
provoked from the audience. This reaction inspired Gildea to expand his research,
and the conclusions he draws in Marianne in Chains are comprehensive and nuanced
....